Aliens Judge Earth And Humans From Space

This whirling green and blue planet, sparkling with white clouds, bright and shimmering seas,

dazzling icecaps, dusty brown deserts, wrinkled snowy mountain ranges and twinkling city lights

Smudged by the smoke from wood fires and factories, wrinkled by roads,

pock-marked by settlements, scratched by the hands of the creatures that evolved here

Full of life from its poles down to its deepest ocean trenches,

its surface animated by the heat stored within,

that amazingly thin atmosphere, rich in oxygen, too rich in our CO²

More than a miracle, though not all that it could be,

spot of life in the emptiness, isolated in a blackness so many light years across,

journeys with its sun ‘til the end of its days

Tilting its axis two times in each orbit, white snow filling the shadow,

as green effloresces under the sun,

whirling in tandem with a huge, silvery moon which brings the tides rippling

and rising in its orbital phases,

seemingly everywhere a beautifully complex set of natural reactions

And one there is of all the species that has cataloged and explained, hypothesized and sermonized, philosophized and capitalized, worshiped and desecrated,

whose work and whose effluvia can be seen from above.

So what would they think looking down from above?

is it a horrid little nest to be kicked hard and snuffed,

or a pleasant, shady grove to pause and relax in?

You be the judge in your home quite safe and warm,

or you make the call tending your fire, poverty-stricken and forlorn,

You show those strangers your wondrous technology, art and possessions,

or hold out your child to them, filthy and emaciated,

and look away as you mumble a confused and meaningless confession